ONT Re: Normative Sciences
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here's more or the less the figure that i'd been looking for to illustrate
the "pragmatic cosmos", or the "pragmatically ordered normative sciences".
i imagine it as 3 co-axial cylinders under a conical envelope, so it's
a little flat in 2 dimensions.
jon awbrey
Subj: Situation Normal
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 09:33:09 -0500
From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
To: Stand Up Ontology <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>
JA = Jon Awbrey
JM = Jean-Marc Orliaguet
JM: A standard is an established set of rules agreed upon by a community,
as such its mode of being is, as Peirce would write, "esse in futuro",
a thirdness. There are three ways in which a standard may be reached:
firstly it may already be a de facto standard, i.e. it exists as such
independently of anything else, secondly it may be imposed by the force
of authority, and thirdly it may be reached through scientific investigation
and be subject to modifications. Why not continue with the subdivisions yourself ... ?
JA: Here, I almost begin to understand what you are saying,
but my mind just does not work in that subdivisive way.
JA: I am guessing that you are talking about standards as norms,
and so we are once again in the realm of normative sciences,
or, as I'm starting to think of them, the "design sciences",
principally: aesthetics, ethics, logic. And it's here, at
this point, that people divide, if not their objects. Some
people speak of absolute values; it appears that pragmatic
thinkers are determined to speak of relative values, and so
I can interpret what you say about this "esse in futuro" or
this "thirdness" like so:
JA: A normative inquiry is one that seeks to know what is best in itself,
what is the best way to achieve what is best in itself, and what is
the best sign of the best way to achieve what is best in itself.
Though I have stated the questions, for effect, in the singular
throughout, it may well be that the answers are a plurality.
JA: When you say "being in the future", I take that to mean the
commonly recognized property of "intentional objects" to be
"not of necessity existent" (n.o.n.existent) in the present
actuality. Is that what you mean? If so, then this notion
is already covered by the connotation of the Greek "pragma".
JA: Now, here's the rub. What could possibly go to support a claim that any agent,
whether community, culture, discipline, field, group, person, or science, has
a knowledge of what is best in any of these three regards?
JM: Jon, the idea of something being better than another involves that of a
comparison, i.e. the idea of a third, and that of being best the idea of
second ("The positive degree of an adjective is first, the superlative
second, the comparative third" 1.337 ) How can something be "best in
itself"? Is it another oxymoron of yours? A "de facto" standard for
instance is no better than another, it simply is but not because it is
better or best. To strive for "a best" standard is another contradiction
in terms, you can strive for a better standard, at best.
JA: I am working within what I usually describe as the "Pragmatic Cosmos" or
the "pragmatically ordered normative sciences" (PONS), that is to say,
a conception of aesthetics, ethics, logic that places them conically
on concentric bases, narrowing from broader to more focussed and
rising to more apical perspectives in the order given, like so:
o-------------------------------------------------o
| |
| o |
| / \ |
| / \ |
| / \ |
| o-------o |
| /| Logic |\ |
| / | | \ |
| / | | \ |
| o---------------o |
| /| | Ethic | |\ |
| / | | | | \ |
| / | | | | \ |
| o-----------------------o |
| /| | Aesthetic | |\ |
| / | | | | | | \ |
| / | | | | | | \ |
| o---o---o---o-------o---o---o---o |
| |
o-------------------------------------------------o
JA: In accord with this ordering of the normative inquiries,
logic is a special case of ethics, while ethics depends
on aesthetics to tell what is "worth the candle" in the
first place, since aesthetics is the most broadly based
in actual experience, but ethics and then logic rise to
ever higher perspectives on the subtended subject areas.
JA: My phrase about the "best in itself" is just a personal paraphrase
of the common notion that the object of aesthetics is the admirable
or the desirable for its own sake, the summum bonum, or highest good.
JA: In the present question, having to do with the relationships of exchange
between "standard of quality" and "quality of standard", we are asked to
deal with 3-adic relations like "X is better than Y for the sake of Z".
But the poverty of the Anglo-American Analytic Affectation in dealing
with such relations makes many here dismiss the entire question as
being beyond their powers to reason about in any consensual and
effective way, much less to build software tools for the job.
Hence the prevalence of irrational means to try to cope
with the problem, or to coup the other's estate.
Jon Awbrey
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